The Founders Preferred ‘E Pluribus Unum’ as a Motto

Anne Klaeysen is a leader of the New York Society for Ethical Culture and serves as the humanist religious life adviser for Columbia University and Barnard College.

Updated April 4, 2012, 4:45 PM

As sentimental as I feel about the one cent coin — rescuing “lucky” pennies from the sidewalk as a child, and later collecting pennies with my children for Penny Harvests to support local community groups — I know that larger interests than mine will duke this out in the public arena. Bills like the Legal Tender Modernization Act will continue to be introduced in Congress as cost-cutting measures, and lobbyists for zinc metal producers and Coinstar, the company that makes change-counting machines, will continue to shoot them down. I wonder how much cash was involved in lobbying before the half-cent coin was retired in 1857.

The "red scare" is over. We no longer need to insist so fervently, on every dollar and coin, that "In God We Trust."

Even if Congress does follow Canada’s example by retiring the penny, we’ll still have to deal with the nickel, which now costs almost a dime to make.

But the cost is only part of the problem with U.S. currency. As a religious humanist, I am more concerned with the words imprinted on every coin and bill in the United States: “In God We Trust,” a motto that the House of Representatives recently saw fit to reaffirm in a resolution that cited “a crisis of national identity.” A far more inclusive motto, “E pluribus unum,” proposed for the first Great Seal of the United States by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in 1776, also appears on all of our coins and some of our bills.

Such was not always the case. After considerable lobbying by the Rev. M. R. Watkinson and other devout Christians, “In God We Trust” first appeared on a two-cent coin in 1864. (It was shortened from the last stanza of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which says, “And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’”) Over the years, this motto disappeared and reappeared on coins until 1955 when, in response to “communist atheism,” Congress approved its use on all currency.

Theodore Roosevelt disapproved of the motto. In The New York Times on Nov. 14, 1907, he wrote, “My own feeling in the matter is due to my very firm conviction that to put such a motto on coins not only does no good but does positive harm, and is in effect irreverence, which comes dangerously close to sacrilege.”

Whether the argument is sacrilege or an outdated remnant of the “red scare,” religious belief has no place on secular currency. Let the many unite in a cause worthy of us all.